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2015: The Year of S/4 HANA

First announced in 2010, it quickly became clear that SAP HANA would be the foundation for everything at SAP. With columnar storage, advanced in-memory compressions, and unmatched processing power, SAP on HANA is fast, empowering businesses to run in real time, crunching Big Data – transactional, operational, structured, & unstructured – to transact, analyze and predict instantly on a single platform at the moment of opportunity.

While HANA’s accolades for speed are well earned, HANA’s ability to dramatically simplify enterprise architecture, reinforce stability, scale limitlessly, and generate big savings in the process are equally impressive.

According to Forrester, enterprises opting to implement SAP HANA can expect to see their software costs fall by more than 70%, their hardware costs by 15%, and their administration and development costs by 20%.

The big data and analytics market will reach $125 billion worldwide in 2015, according to IDC.

It is no surprise that today, according to SAP, HANA has more than 5,800 customers and more than 1,850 customers running Business Suite on HANA, making it the fastest-growing product in SAP history.

S/4 HANA is sure to further accelerate this torrid pace of HANA adoption.

It also goes without saying that companies of all sizes and across all industry are rapidly migrating core processes to the Cloud.

Many HANA customers have tested the waters with HANA data marts (HANA as side cart) or BW-on-HANA or BPC on HANA. Now, with Business Suite on S/4 HANA, HANA implementations are sure to hit an inflection point.

In a nutshell, S/4 HANA is a collection of integrated, modernized ERP (and other) apps with a simplified code and data model (no material aggregates to be maintained) capable of running OLTP and OLAP on the same system.

In addition to ease of implementation without disruption, S/4 HANA benefits include compression, real time analytics, landscape simplification, and ease of configuration, delivered through a simplified and enhanced end-user interface based on SAP Fiori. S/4 HANA, not incidentally, is also optimized for cloud deployment.

As the cloud-computing paradigm shift plays out and more mission-critical functions ascend to the cloud, and as reported by Computerworld, 53% of IT leaders cite cost containment as their number one business priority, S/4 HANA will play a pivotal role in 2015, simplifying and reducing hardware costs, driving deeper cost savings from cloud services; increasing the cloud’s analytic and BI capabilities by orders of magnitude; wringing latency from cloud-based services; and infusing cloud services with unprecedented reach and flexibility.

A Closer Look at S/4 HANA (Per SAP)

S/4HANA (or short: S/4) is the next-generation Business Suite — a new product and not a legal successor of the SAP Business Suite 7 — based on the following three attributes:

SAP HANA as the underlying platform with increased speed, merge of analytical and transactional data (OLTP & OLAP merge) and in-memory compression to reduce data footprint. S4 is only built on SAP HANA.

All these three products will be delivered out of the same codeline — the sINFINITY codeline — and share the same simplifications, same Fiori UIs, same shared libraries and cloud qualities (e.g. Web-based printing). They simply differ on scope level (which is achieved via configuration packages). S/4 will be based on a new NetWeaver version — NW 7.50 for the on-Premise instalments and NW 7.60 for the cloud deployments.

What S/4 products will be delivered throughout 2015?

We will deliver in Q1 an S/4 on-Premise version consisting of Suite on HANA and Simple SAP Finance (sFIN). From March onwards it will contain sFIN version 2.0 featuring the new unified journal for FI/CO.

We will deliver in Q1 (Beta) and Q2 (GA) an S/4 Public Cloud version consisting of 10 simple end2end core processes in the areas of finance, logistics, procurement, customer engagement and professional services. Customers can choose between two products:

SAP Simple Project2 Deliver (Professional Services)

SAP Hybris Marketing

We will deliver in Q2 (Beta) and Q3 (GA) the S/4HANA Private Managed Cloud version offering a full ERP in the cloud to our installed base customers and net new names that are looking to state-of-the-art innovations based on HANA in the SAP Cloud.

We will deliver in Q4 an update to the S/4 on-Premise version consisting of Suite on HANA, Simple SAP Finance (sFIN) and Simple Logistics (sLOG). In addition existing Suite customers (anyDB) can enjoy an Enhancement Package 8 (all innovations except the Exchange Innovation add-ons for finance and logistics)

Test Drive S/4 HANA

Available in the Cloud, on premise and in hybrid deployments, S/4 HANA further enables SAP customers to map out an implementation strategy for HANA that best suits their immediate and future goals.

At NTT DATA, we invest in SAP to ensure that our customers always get the most from their SAP investment.

Our NTT DATA SAP Solution Centers are state of the art facilities featuring a wide array of integrated SAP industry, line of business, analytical, and technical products where IT decision makers, using their own data, can experience live demonstrations of the very latest SAP solutions, build business cases for investing in SAP, test enhancements to their existing SAP landscapes, and learn first hand how mobility, enterprise performance management (EPM), enterprise information management (EIM), the cloud, analytics and the power of SAP HANA can drive process improvements, efficiency gains, competitiveness and profits.

NTT DATA customers can expect S/4 HANA to be up and running in the NTT DATA Solution Centers within 45 day of the release.